Friday

Well, the neighborhood association meeting Wednesday had 20 attendees, who all fitted in the Weird Room without a problem. And while I perched on the kitchen stool, I still had one chair from the living room and another stool that could have been pressed into service, so seating was OK. If the A/C had just been able to overcome the day's 100-degree high and get the house cooler than 80+, I'd have felt it went extremely well. The kitchen was admired (a couple of people told me they came to the meeting to see the kitchen), the brownies and blondies were munched upon, and the usual rants about various zoning/development/etc. issues occurred. As I'm either on the fence (about a proposed large development that involves selling property owned by the school system) or on the opposite side (on commuter rail) from the majority of those at the meeting, I was pretty silent during the actual meeting. Except for the lapse of judgement when I agreed to produce the biennial neighborhood directory. Anyone got a database set up for such a task?

But now it's Friday, and I'm packing for a weekend trip to my father's while waiting on the cable guy. The cable guy is to rewire the TV connection to allow full access to the digital cable package that they upgraded me to "at the same rate as you are currently paying". Which means I should have paid attention and switched to a cheaper plan a while ago given my extremely low usage of the TV, but I'm getting the digital instead. <g> It's mostly working already except for the "On Demand" stuff that I don't use, but if this gets me a new wiring job on their penny I figure I'll let them go ahead. When that's done and I've been to Weight Watchers, I'll hit the road.

At the bird bath

It's big-bird time at the bird bath: 2 flickers and a red-bellied woodpecker on the rim, and at least 3 blue jays looking for space. A couple of brown thrashers are also in the vicinity.

Over on the feeder, a little Carolina wren was in the suet feeder cage this morning. Took a couple of tries for it to find its way back out, under pressure to get out of the way of the jay that was waiting nearby.

Cable TV "service"

And in the best tradition of cable TV companies everywhere: Comcast cancelled my appointment for this morning and didn't bother to let me know. I waited through the 3-hour appointment window, then called to discover this. It took calls to 2 different toll-free numbers to find out why.

They now say that the problem (can't get to the "on demand" part of the digital cable, though everything else works) doesn't need wiring. The supervisor of the clueless phone-bank person told her to tell me that the connection will be reset and everything will then work. I told Clueless that the technician that came out before did that--but she's clueless, and can only relay what she's told and apologize. Oh, and she doesn't know why no one called to let me know the appointment was cancelled. And she'll follow up after the reset is done, she said.